Canadian Slavonic Papers, I by G. S. N. Luckyj; W. J. Rose; L. I. StrakhovskyReview by: Georgette DonchinThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 36, No. 87 (Jun., 1958), pp. 583-584Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4205001 .

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REVIEWS 583

Avvakum's writings can be found in the works of his predecessors, and yet his extraordinary literary talent undoubtedly makes Avvakum the greatest writer of Muscovite Russia.

Professor J. T. Shaw's contribution deals with the Byronic tradition of the romantic verse-tale in Russian literature and with Lermontov's Mtsyri. He claims that in spite of several general studies of the relation- ship between Byron and Lermontov, no detailed study of any major work of Lermontov in the light of his indebtedness to Byron exists,' with the exception of The Hero of Our Time. Thus Professor Shaw concentrates on the complicated problem of the genesis of Mtsyri. Though written in 1839, Mtsyri is based on material collected in I830, a period in which Lermontov exhausted the adaptations from Pushkin, and went directly to Byron for the features of the Oriental tales which Pushkin had not adopted.

Other contributions include an interpretative sketch on Soviet thought in the I93os, a discussion on panslavism and Czechoslovak policy during the last war, a study of Russian calques in the West Finnic languages, and the texts of five Hutsul healing-incantations published for the first time.

London GEORGETTE DONCHIN

Canadian Slavonic Papers, L. Edited by G. S. N. Luckyj, W. J. Rose, and L. I. Strakhovsky. Published for the Canadian Association of Slavists by the University of Toronto Press in co-operation with the Univer- sity of British Columbia, Toronto, 1956. vi + Io6 pages.

THE appearance of this new journal is a promising sign of the vigour with which Slavonic studies are being pursued in Canada, the home of about a million people of Slavonic origin, and the writers represented in this first volume include both European-trained slavists and Canadian-born scholars. Professor G. W. Simpson, the President of the Canadian Associa- tion of Slavists-the body sponsoring this publication-expresses the hope that the volume will serve as a modest beginning towards domesticating Slavonic studies in the Dominion for their 'broad humanistic values alone and by scholars without any bias of ethnic or political colouring'.

Readers of this journal and the many friends and former students of Professor W. J. Rose, formerly director of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies and subsequently Visiting Professor in the University of British Columbia, will greet with pleasure his editorial association with the new publication. To this issue he contributes a penetrating article on the Mickiewicz centenary, prompted by Dr Weintraub's book (The Poetry of Adam Mickiewicz) which, he says, is a signal contribution to a synthesis of the various appraisals of the great Polish poet.

A Polish poet of another generation is discussed by Mr Dembowski in I Editor's Note. I dealt with this subject in my Ph. D. (Lond.) thesis in I926. The thesis

was published in a revised form with the title The Influence of Byron on Russian Poetry in Latvijas Universitates Raksti, Filologijas un Filozofijas Fakultates Serija, VI, I, Riga, 1940. Lermontov's indebtedness to Byron is covered in detail in chapter VII (pp 96-13I), where there is an analysis of Mtsyri.

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584 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

his paper on Julian Tuwim. Particularly interesting are his comments on the originality of Tuwim's language, on his search for 'archetypes of speech' (ukryta pierwszyzna), and on his desire to resurrect obsolete voca- bulary-all this within a basically traditional form. The great diversity of Tuwim's work deserves detailed study, and the time will soon be ripe for determining Tuwim's place in 20th-century Polish poetry.

The Canadian character of the journal is stressed by the publication of some interesting documents dealing with the Dukhobor settlement. The documents (from the papers of the late Professor Mavor) shed much light on the unsuccessful compensation claim made by the sect against the Canadian government after their expulsion from homesteads in Saskat- chewan. These were granted to them on their arrival in Canada at the end of the igth century. Although they had been told that 'there is no land under the sun where there is more liberty and tolerance in regard to religious and material matters than in Canada', nevertheless in I907 the Canadian government in a rather arbitrary manner confiscated their lands, the ostensible reason being that this anarchistic sect, which recog- nises no authority but that of God and His Son, refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Crown of England and thus transgressed the laws of Canada.

Other papers in the issue include an analysis of Bunin's autobiograph- ical novel The Life of Arsen'yev by Dr C. H. Bedford of the University of Toronto, a paper on Pushkin and the Emperors Alexander I and Nicholas I by Professor Leonid Strakhovsky, a study of a play by the Ukrainian dramatist Mykola Kulish, as well as three linguistic studies pertaining to themes as varied as spelling pronunciation in modern literary Russian, the linguistic aspect of the controversy over the authenticity of the 'Lay of Igor", and Slavonic toponymic neologisms in Canada.

London GEORGETTE DONCHIN

Siberia and the Reforms of i822. By Marc Raeff, Seattle, I956. xvii + 2IO

pages. Appendices and bibliography.

THIS short book is part of a series of publications on Russia in Asia, under- taken by the Far Eastern and Russian Institute of the University of Washington. It deals principally with the reforms carried out by Speran- sky as Governor-General of Siberia. Mr Raeff briefly discusses the work of Speransky's predecessors and the main features of Siberian society. He notes that, in the absence of a landed nobility, the social elite consisted of bureaucrats and merchants; but that the narrow outlook of the merchants, thinking in terms of restrictive privileges rather than of opportunities of enterprise, was an obstacle to progress. Among Speransky's achievements he reckons a certain encouragement to business enterprise, which con- tributed to the appreciable flowering of the capitalist virtues in Siberia at the turn of the Igth and 20th centuries. Mr Raeff briefly summarises the administrative structure created by Speransky. A fault of this section is that he does not make sufficiently clear in what respects this differed from

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